More Recent Comments

Monday, September 21, 2009

The "yuck factor"

We live in a society that values change and innovation1 but some changes are too much to stomach. An example might be the proposal to eliminate pain and suffering in cattle raised in feedlots or chickens confined to huge barns (or cages).

"What's wrong with that?", you might ask. You might think that eliminating feedlots is a good thing, but that's not what's being proposed. Instead, the proposal is to genetically modify animals so they quite literally "feel no pain" (Shriver 2009).

The author of this proposal, Adam Shriver, is a philosopher and the suggestion should be treated as a thought experiment and not as a feat of genetic engineering that's about to be implemented by a major meatpacking company. Shriver is a vegetarian so he's familiar with the main arguments against eating meat.

One of those arguments is that the animals we eat are often raised under inhumane conditions where they suffer pain and psychological stress. If we can genetically eliminate pain and stress, then one of the main arguments against meat eating disappears. The logic is impeccable.

Vegans and vegetarians are not about to throw steaks on the BBQ. That's because the "pain and stress" argument isn't really behind their decision to avoid meat.2 There are other, far more important, reasons behind their choice of food. What a thought experiment will do, hopefully, is get rid of illogical arguments and focus more attention on the real ethical questions that divide vegetarians and omnivores.

Sometimes it's not easy to explain why something is unsettling. This is called the "yuck factor" in the editorial. The yuck factor is not always a reliable indicator of real ethical problem.

Some conservative commentators argue that the yuck factor is a reliable indicator that a moral Rubicon has been crossed. Yet all too often such distaste is irrational and a barrier to progress. Progressive thought often comes from ignoring such reactions and thinking things through logically instead.

The editorial argues that opposition to pain-free animals is not irrational. The "real" debate is whether factory farming is acceptable in the first place. It's perfectly respectable to oppose the development of genetically modified (GM) animals, according to the editors of New Scientist.

Maybe, maybe not, that's not the point. As Shriver points out, if you use the argument of pain and suffering then you are bound by rationality to support GM animals. Taking that argument off the table does not mean that you favor factory farms and meat-eating.

The arguments between vegetarians and omnivores often boil down to arguments based on emotions versus arguments based on rationality. I usually side with rationality (but not always).

1. Sometimes this causes problems, such as when we get confused about the difference between "change" and "improvement." They are not synonyms.

2. And neither is the "ecology" argument. If we could prove tomorrow that raising free-range cattle on scrubland was more energy-efficient than trying to grow wheat on that same land, it wouldn't convert a single vegetarian.

9 comments
:

Douglas Adams - the Restaurant at the End of the Universe features a talking cow that has been bred to enjoy being killed and eaten. It even goes to meet the diners and recommend its best bits ! Life imitating art again, and the genius of the late Mr Adams

I first encountered the Yuck Factor (at least, in a form forceful enough to make me sit up and pay attention to it as an argument) a few years ago, on the Letters page of the local rag. No less than two writers that day inveighed against gay marriage on the grounds that homosexuality was disgusting, and our reaction of disgust reflected a basic moral insight. IOW: God is just as squeamish as I am, and about the same things.

The other thing that disturbed me about the letters was that both of them were from people who had been friends of mine, back in my Christian days :-\.

My son has been vegetarian (egs, dairy OK) since he started eating solid food. In a family of omnivores he is a standout now for 16 years. I asked him if he would be interested in eating cultured animal tissue from a lab-workshop, as some have proposed we could do in the future. He says no. There's something about animals as food that unsettles him deeply.

I haven't read the article, but I think there are good reasons against engineering pain-free animals. How does one restrain something the size of a cow that feels no pain? Barbed wire and electrified fences, cattle prods...all these things depend on the fact that pain is a strong motivator.

I also think that when people talk about "pain and suffering", they're talking about something more than the physical sensation of pain. I think it's often shorthand for a larger "quality of life" argument. And quality of life, or "instrinsic value"-type arguments aren't predicated on a single factor that you could engineer.

(My personal arguments against eating meat are based on a "yuck" factor - that I can't bring myself to eat animals I have seen alive - but are buttressed by a desire to reduce my environmental footprint.)

Well, the simplest way to raise pain-free meat is to culture the tissue on some sort of artifical substrate. If you could grow a single organ (muscle) and supply it with the necessary nutriants, that is.

From that point of view, if you start at the bottom and add require organs as necessary, rather than deleting undesirable ones, you end up with a much smaller yuck factor (at least it seems to me). You might in the long run end up with the same collection of organs, though (seeing as its economically undesirable to invest resources in unusable organs).

Well, the simplest way to raise pain-free meat is to culture the tissue on some sort of artifical substrate. If you could grow a single organ (muscle) and supply it with the necessary nutriants, that is.

Mmmmmm...Chicky-Nobs....(Just don't start enhancing the brains of swine, or we might be screwed).

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Subscribe to Sandwalk

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.